Identifier ownership?

There has been some discussion about the issue of "ownership" v. "control" of digital identifiers on the Identity Gang mailing list of late.

My penny's worth (also posted to the mailing list):

The trouble with the issue of ownership of identifiers is—who polices their control within a given scope?

To my mind, it all comes down to negotiation within relationship: for identifiers to be useful beyond the scope physical devices we have direct control of, we need the co-operation of the administrators of the domains within which those identifiers reference information.

This holds as true of an i-name resolved by a global authority (XRI.org) as it does of a domain-specific Google ID: in each case, for reliable resolution of our identifier, we are dependent on the co-operation of the identifier "authority" that enables a given network of identifiers to function.

As so many of us here have noted so often in various ways, digital identity (or "personas"), and hence digital identifiers, are things that must be negotiated.

That said, having negotiated my persona with a given online e.g. service, there's no reason one or both parties can't require a legally-binding contract to seal the deal, of course. It's the concept of ownership in the abstract of specific community context that is problematic for me.

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